I remember being a fairly young kid, lets’ say junior high school age, and seeing a copy of The Joy of Sex for the first time. I was over a friend’s house and her parents had a copy on their bookshelf. I found the hippieish couple featured in the book hard to identify with but I was still enthralled with all the things you could do with, or to, other people sexually. Well, licking a hairy underarm pit made Jr. high school me go “eeewww” (and in truth is not something I choose to do today but I won’t yuck anyone’s yum) but most of the stuff looked cool.

You may be surprised to know that sex manuals didn’t start in the free love 60s and 70s. Nor were they limited to the Kama Sutra. You can find them scattered around history, from ancient to Victorian. It not only took a village to raise a child but it often took a village to teach women how to have them, and often even how to enjoy practicing sex in general.

There’s actually too many for me to write in full about each one in one post. Here is a list of some of the more significant sex manuals, up to The Joy of Sex, just to give you an idea of how far back we’ve been writing about sex. I’ll go into depth on each on in future posts.